The company I work for recently published a policy forbidding blogging while at work. From first glance this looks like a natural and normal thing – why should they provide resources to enable people to blog. Blog from home on your own time and with your own resources. At second glance this is a little scary for the paranoid blogger. Read the rest of this entry »

This month marks two years for my Vista install on my laptop. It is absolutely the best operating system I’ve ever used. Here’s what would have happened to me had I installed a different operating system two years ago:

Windows XP – the next logical choice: My laptop would have been reloaded 3 times since and I would be getting ready to reload again now. Most of my XP installations had to be reloaded every 6 months.

Linux: Month of my life wasted on emerge (if Gentoo). Months of my life wasted on troubleshooting hardware and getting sleep, wireless, etc, just right. Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, but I’ve never had any success making everything work perfectly on a laptop, and by perfectly I mean that I can keep it running for a month without rebooting it – just putting it in sleep and hibernation when not in use.

I’m looking forward to upgrading to Windows 7 when it comes out. I’ve been running Windows 7 on another test machine at work and so far it seems pretty nice, and faster than Vista on the same hardware.

I’m having something happen to me that has never happened before. I’m getting bored with an install. Nothing is going wrong on my laptop. There’s nothing for me to tweak, nothing to fix, nothing I need to change. It just works exactly how I need it to when I need it to. Maybe it is time to start dual-booting something else.

I just saw an article on Wired called 8 Signs That Apple Customers Are No Longer Special. I am going to breech the Apple vs. PC subject here with my 2 cents. First of all, the article has some good points, but the larger picture is that Apple has fans that spend money on them rather than customers. Customers are a fairly loyal sort of people. You give them a good product at a good price and they will likely return when they need to replace that product. Even more, they will go out and tell their friends who they bought the product from and you can build a base of loyal customers this way. A fan on the other hand is fickle and moves on as soon as something better comes along. Apple’s “customers” are more fan than customer. Read the rest of this entry »

GM has halted work on the factory that is to produce the engine for the Volt. This is absolutely the last thing they should be doing right now. They need to commit 100% to the Volt at the expense of all else. I don’t care if they halt every other production line and sell every car on a lot for half price, they need to downsize and fully invest in the Volt. Their survival depends on it. This to me is just evidence that either GM has no idea what they are doing, or they are trying to manipulate the public into giving them cash so that they can continue working on the Volt. It’s time to take them over and hand off Volt technology to a company who will know how to build it properly and market it effectively.

I’ve written about the Atom processor and what it could do to save power if used in enterprise. Here are some things that I’ve done to save energy at home.

1. Replaced all my lights with CFL (Compact FLourescent) bulbs.
2. Replaced windows with triple pane vinyl.
3. Fixed the draft under the front door with a draft guard like you’ve probably seen on TV.
4. Replaced a 50+ year old boiler (in progress).

Reports on some of these are going to be subjective since I was not thinking at the time that I would be reporting on them, but I thought I would post this as an encouragement to some who may be thinking about undertaking a project like this.

Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t too long ago that we had this little thing called the dot com bust. What if the government had bailed out the tech firms as they plan to do to the auto industry? Here’s a little glimpse into what our lives would look like. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate to make another post about Entrecard, but enough is happening there that I feel it justified. While browsing around recently I came across an article by impNERD about the problems with Entrecard. He has another post on the subject which describes many of the problems facing the community. In my opinion he is spot on with some of the problems identified, although I do not visit the Entrecard forums frequently enough to understand all the dissent that it sounds like there must be. Some of my suggestions are below.

Read the rest of this entry »

I do not want to comment much about the credit crunch except as it influences technology. I wanted to bring a warning to people who use Vonage about something from my personal experience with VoIP. SunRocket went out of business suddenly and without warning leaving me and thosands of other people without service including 911. They managed to keep some people’s lines going from what I understand, but mine was immediately cut off. Vonage’s most recent 10Q talks about their debt and gives some warnings. If you have Vonage I encourage you to take a look at their investor relations pages and read this information for yourself. I’m not suggesting that they won’t secure the financing that they need to stay in business, I’m just giving a warning that you may want to do some research now on what you would do should your phone suddenly stop working. It was a mad rush to other VoIP providers when that happened, and I was already testing Packet 8 on the 30 day free trial, so I had it relatively easy.

Just at a minimum make sure you have a cell phone handy – even one without a service plan will work fine for 911 calls and won’t cost you a penny except to keep it charged.

On the same subject, you may want to look at other publicly traded companies that you do business with to see what their financials look like. I’m not suggesting you break off with Vonage or anyone else, because that will only increase the problem, just that you make the most of the resources that you have and make smart buying decisions. It is my opinion that this thing will blow over more quickly than most people expect, but more companies will go under before it is over.

UPDATE: Vonage having trouble selling its debt.

UPDATE (10/20/2008): The criticality of the deal is over, Vonage refinanced its debt, but the terms are not great.

I receive so many eWeek emails that it isn’t funny, and most of the time I have to just delete them because I don’t have time to even open them let alone read them. Recently however a headline What Is the Nature of an IT Worker? caught my eye. The article discusses, very briefly, a few of the common problems for IT workers and the things that cause those issues. For example, overworked, constant interruption, and a perception from others that they don’t understand the business. I can only speak definitively on my own experience, since I don’t want to repeat sentiment I’ve heard on the net, so here are my two cents.

Overworked

IT workers are the most consistently overworked individuals where I work. There are other groups of people who have projects or deadlines where they may work 50 hour weeks, but on average their numbers are much lower. I know of several individuals outside of IT who have claimed to work much more than they actually do, and I know people in IT who claim to work a lot more than they actually do. They are looking for the “sorry me” pitty that accompanies it, often to get out of doing something else. The cold numbers state that IT workers on average consistently work more than any other department. But not by much. So what is the real problem here? I have this posted on my name plate outside my cube:

I have infinite capacity to do more work so long as you don’t mind that my quality approaches zero. –Scott Adams (Get your daily dose: Dilbert: 2009 Day-to-Day Calendar (Dilbert) )

The real problem is that IT workers are not properly validated for their work. When validation comes it comes in the form of more work. The harder an IT worker works, the more tasks and projects are given to him, which up to a point is a great thing and validates his career, but after a certain point causes burnout and a crash. I was in two meetings this past week with groups of individuals who had a specific job function. One was for UNIX administrators and one was for something dealing with security. In both groups I described my activities and breadth of work and was asked who was helping me. “I am the only one here who does this,” was my answer, which is completely true, “and these are only one part of the many things that I do.” I realized that a few of the people on the line had less work to do than I did, had help or a backup for that work, and that for all of them that single focus area was all they were expected to do. This is what I get for being good at the many things I do, and is also pretty much the only thing that validates me at work. That is the problem.

I called a co-worker at another office location this week as well and gave him a problem that I was having with something under his jurisdiction and he thanked me saying something to the effect that he was glad I called him and gave him a challenge. He was feeling like he needed a reason to be there for that day. In effect I validated him by giving him that task. Crazy! Yes, we IT workers are validated when you overwork us, which is probably why you do, but if that is the only thing you do then we will turn into the type of people who take baseball bats to computer equipment. Hint: Money is always good. Occasional comp time when projects are at a low point is also good. Emails to the entire organization about the next problem (keep reading) are also well received and is cheap.

Constant Interruption

IT workers are unique in this, and I don’t mean that no one else gets interrupted, but there is no other group who get less respect than IT. Just yesterday I was having a training meeting with the IT group to bring everyone else up to speed on an encryption project. Half the group got pulled away for “more important things” because apparently IT things aren’t important. While in the hour long meeting I was twice interrupted by an engineer who just had to pop in and have a question answered right that second. The non-work related questions also need to be taken outside of work hours. Just because I can fix your home computer does not mean that I want to, or that I want to hear about it and give you free advice.

I am also constantly doing projects – long term ones that can require a good 15 minutes of focus before becoming efficient. With the cube world being as it is I am constantly interrupted by a person walking up to my cube and stomping or scuffing his feet right at the end to announce his presence. Pretending to not hear the stomping and scuffing does not work. The questions are as often non-work related as they are work related, and rarely are they things that I will help them with immediately anyway. Between Wednesday and Thursday I was interrupted by one individual four times for a petty problem a computer illiterate contractor was having while trying to get on our contractor VLAN. That probably set me back an hour between those two days, and it is nothing that I should be doing – we have a help desk for that sort of thing, but they were out running about doing their jobs, so I got bugged. I won’t even mention the phone calls, or the constant meetings about having other meetings. You know what I’m talking about.

Perception from others as not knowing the business

This one gets IT people frequently although it is probably not as widely understood by those outside the industry. I saw it mentioned in the eWeek article which is why I mention it. IT people, especially ones that graduated with Computer Science degrees, often get artificially devalued for not understanding the business reasons for doing something. The thing is, it is often the exact opposite problem. IT people are forced to live to strict standards in large business IT and to provide a balance between many different forces. We live by Sarbanes-Oxley rules, legal rules, security standards, business needs, efficiency requirements, deadlines, budgets, equipment and software limitations, and quality standards just to name a few. IT people know better than most about the real reasons for doing things the way they are done. It is the non-IT worker who just ran out of hard drive space who wants to run to staples to buy another hard drive for $150 to fix our storage problems. They are the ones that don’t understand the business reasons for doing things. (Hint for those of you not in IT, a SAN is frequently used for anything mission critical, and it costs way more than $150.)

I speak from a biased standpoint since both of my degrees are Business degrees. I felt that it would be a waste of my time and money to focus solely on computer classes when I can just open a book up and figure something out. IT comes naturally to me. The Business is where IT really provides its worth. I do not have contempt for my CS brothers even if they tend to have contempt for me. I do believe that more IT workers should be business trained than CS trained, but most IT workers with Business or Science degrees who work in any decent size business environment figure out the business quickly, and usually know more about that business than most any one else there.

Saw this article over on Engadget where HP thinks that changing the interface on Linux is equivalent to writing an OS. Original article with more details is at Businesweek.

Just want to clarify something here. RedHat is not an operating system. SuSE is not an operating system. Linux is an operating system. BSD is an operating system. Microsoft Windows is an operating system. If I skin Windows and add in some freeware applications it doesn’t make it a new operating system. I think Microsoft would have an issue with that. The only way people get away with saying things like this is that there is no one who controls Linux from a commercial standpoint.

It is intersting that they think they want to undertake the maintenance duties of developing their own flavor of Linux. I think they would be much better served by using SuSE or RedHat, or even Ubuntu. The major PC vendors have displayed many times that they can’t get open source right. In fact, one of the biggest gripes I have with Dell is that they charge more for their hardware if you buy Linux than if you buy Windows, and they don’t offer their higher end hardware with Linux. I’m the kind of person who always wipes a PC clean and reinstalls the operating system after I get a system, so it doesn’t matter much to me whether or not it comes with Linux, but I think there should be some kind of price break for not having to pay for Windows. Unfortunately it seems that the actual value to the big name PC makers is diminished by having Linux on the box. Apparently they get so many kickbacks from Microsoft that they subsidize the hardware. Right.

Anyway, this rant brought to you because an Operating System is different than a Theme and set of installed applications.